Academy Fellow

Professor Jarzabkowski has shown significant leadership in building the global research community in the area of Strategy-as-Practice and seeing it become institutionalised as a field. For example, in 2005 she was a co-founder of the Strategy-as-Practice Standing Working Group at the leading European conference, European Group for Organization Studies. In 2010, Professor Jarzabkowski was also a founding member of the Strategizing Activities and Practice Interest Group at leading North American conference, Academy of Management. Now, more than 20 years on, this field of research is institutionalized, with papers in every leading journal, streams and subthemes at multiple conferences, and many review papers and special issues. Professor Jarzabkowski was instrumental in publishing many of the foundational works for the field, including the first research monograph with Sage in 2005, has continued to grow and develop the research agenda, not least through editing special issues of key journals, alongside her community building and international leadership. Professor Jarzabkowski routinely publishes with her students and postdocs, thereby creating a new generation of research leaders.  She is also a prolific author in the leading management/strategy journals, with an especially strong record in journals ranked A* by the Australian Business Dean’s Councils.  

In conducting her research, Professor Jarzabkowski has had to innovate methodologically. For instance, she has conducted extensive audio and video ethnography and also led international teams in designing a way to study organizations all over the world ethnographically by tracing how interpretations flow between people across organizations through their common practices. In recognition of her outstanding contributions in establishing this new field, in 2024 Professor Jarzabkowski was honoured to receive the Academy of Management’s Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award. This award is presented once every 2 years to scholars who have taken a leadership role in opening up new lines of thinking or inquiry.

Professor Jarzabkowski believes in doing research with impact. She is a global expert in the public-private mechanisms proliferating around the world to address the disaster insurance protection gap. Her research explains how we can transform the insurance market to be a partner in adapting to climate change, including how innovations in disaster risk financing and risk pooling can support climate adaptation and response. Currently Paula is conducting funded research to evaluate the Queensland Resilient Homes Fund and it implications for the physical, financial, social and emotional resilience of disaster-affected individuals and communities in withstanding and recovering from future disasters. Paula’s expertise is widely recognised as a member of the OECD High-Level Advisory Board for the Financial Management of Catastrophic Risks; the Lloyd’s of London Futureset Technical Advisory Group; and the Pool Reinsurance Company Advisory Council.

University of Queensland, Australia

City St George’s, University of London, UK

Fellow of the British Academy

Fellow of the Academy of Management

1. Jarzabkowski, P., Chalkias, K., Cacciatori, E., & Bednarek, R. (2023). Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Disaster. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press

2. Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., & Spee, P. (2015). Making a Market for Acts of God: The Practice of Risk-trading in the Global Reinsurance Industry. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press

3. Jarzabkowski, P. Seidl, D. & Balogun, J. (2022). From germination to propagation: Two decades of Strategy-as-Practice research and potential future directions. Human Relations. 75.8: 1533-1589.

4. Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., Chalkias, K., & Cacciatori, E. (2022) Enabling rapid financial response to disasters: Knotting and reknotting multiple paradoxes in inter-organizational systems. Academy of Management Journal. 65.5: 1477-1506

5. Jarzabkowski, P., Unger, C., Meissner, K. Valuing what you risk and risking what you value: Advancing a research agenda for risk studies. Organization Studies. (forthcoming).